by Lanfranco Ferroni

Juridical Culture and Living Law is the on-line journal published by the Law Department of the University of Urbino. It aims at the knowledge of law in its amplitude and complexity, with a particular attention to the various components that law assumes from life, culture and society.

Today more than ever people studying juridical phenomena need to undertake complex ways of search that are characterized by interdisciplinarity. The core of this approach consists in the dialogue among scholars of positive law and historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists. Interdisciplinarity is the key to investigate deeply every legal topic. The link between culture and living law – as it is expressed in the title of journal – also uncovers our starting point : legal knowledge can be articulated, developed and increased only through its interpreters, wherever they operate: at Universities as teachers or scholars, in Tribunals as lawyers or judges and so on, where they are called to research, thought, dialogue.

As Giuseppe Giliberti pointed out (see Manifest) – law is a “living” subject, not only for its feature to be a subject of interpretation on the basis of case-law. Law is a “living law” in an authentically evolutionary and purposeful perspective, as a result of a hermeneutical process during which the interests and the values expressing the juridical culture of a given time prevail.

Urbino is not only the background of this project. Urbino, town of a first Renaissance and extraordinary emotions, recalls us to a method of enquiry that, on one side, suggests to trespass narrow disciplinary boundaries, and, on the other side, it urges respect for the strictness which is inherent in scientific search. The intimate meaning of the law, but also of the juridical science and culture, is based on the need of measuring and the search for “orders” of the measure. This idea is perfectly evoked in the painting of Mario Logli, which, through its regoli and its vision of the Renaissance in Urbino, provides us with new and further means to approach the challenges of the modern world.

In this difficult but fascinating way, Juridical Culture and Living Law aims at welcoming in Urbino the scholars interested in Law and Culture, and their old and new questions, their doubts and possible answers. Its ambition is to constitute a sort of modern and open, where reason and measure do not disdain creative and innovative intuitions, and culture does not represent just a segment but the pursuance of the extraordinary journey of Sciences and Arts as well as of the unrestrainable human growing.